Don’t take just one photo, take many

The natural inclination for the novice photographer is to pull out your camera and to take a single shot and call it done. The reality is that most experienced photographers take multiple shots and then choose the best one. This is especially nessisary when you are photographing people. You don’t want your one shot to be the one with them with their eyes closed or grimmacing.

Move around and try different angles
It’s simple to move slightly to the left, to the right, or to move lower to try a different angle for a shot. This will give you lots of alternatives that you wouldn’t have gotten had you taken only that one shot,

Distract your subjects (catch them off guard)
Most people don’t feel comfortable having their photos taken, so it’s always a good idea to try to get your subjects feeling more comfortable when you’re shooting them. The easiest way to get them comfortable and smiling is to tell them a joke or to say something goofy, and to then shoot them when they are reacting to what you said.

When they do start to laugh, keep shooting (as per tip 1 above) so that you’ve got lots of choices to choose from.

Try different times of day/different types of weather
If there’s an interesting location near you that you’d like to photograph, try going back there at different times of day or under different weather conditions can make for a totally different photo. There is often fog at sunrise, which can transform a ho-hum landscape into a total “wow” of a photograph. Likewise heading to that location when there is dramatic weather.

Use the golden hours
As an addendum for tip four, the golden hours (the times just before and after sunrise and sunset) make for the best time to shoot landscapes. That time of day not only provides beautiful colors in the sky, but it’s also the time when the light is softer and the shadows are longer.